Judgment Call

by J. A. Jance

  The polite thing for Joanna and Detective Howell to do would have been to walk away and let Abby Holder deal with her mother’s issues in private, but this was a homicide investigation. As someone who had worked with the victim day in and day out for years, Abby Holder might well have insights into the workings of Debra Highsmith’s life that no one else could provide.

  There was another series of raps on the closed door. “Abigail? Are you still there?”

  “We don’t mind at all, do we, Deb?” Joanna said with a bright smile. “Any information you can give us at this stage would be a huge help.”

  Reluctantly, Abby opened the door and allowed them to enter. Just inside the door a tiny woman sat hunched in a wheelchair. She gripped a colorful cane in one hand and was clearly within seconds of staging another assault on the door, whose marred surface already gave clear evidence of several previous blows. The woman appeared to be afflicted with a severe widow’s hump, one that left her face permanently pointing into her lap. Thin gray hair did little to conceal the balding spot on the top of her head.

  “It’s about time you came inside,” she complained, peering up at them sideways due to an inability to raise her head. “You told me you were going to make some tea. I’m still waiting.”

  Looking at her, Joanna was reminded of a time when, as a little girl, she had climbed into a cottonwood tree to spy on a nest of newly hatched crows. Joanna had gotten only the smallest peek at the naked, angry, and demanding little things before an infuriated mama crow had shown up on the scene to drive the interloper away. Abby Holder’s mother wasn’t naked, but she had angry and demanding down to a science.

  Abby gestured Joanna and Deb into the living room. “Could I interest you in some tea?”

  “Please,” Joanna said, accepting for both of them. “That would be great.”

  While Abby retreated into what must have been the kitchen, Joanna and Deb seated themselves side by side on a chintz sofa. The living room was small and crowded with too much oversize furniture. There were two large easy chairs that matched the sofa. A huge glass-fronted buffet was shoved up against one wall with a flat-screen television perched on top of that. On the muted screen the cast members of some afternoon soap opera were going through their paces. Every available inch of wall space was covered with framed artwork—notably oversize desert landscapes done in vivid oils.

  To Joanna’s way of thinking, none of the colorful furnishings in the crowded room quite squared with plain-Jane Abby Holder who always dressed in black or gray, whose hair was always pulled back into an old-fashioned, simple French twist, and whose face never showed a single hint of makeup. The furniture seemed far more in keeping with Abby’s mother, who was dressed in a vivid orange muumuu and whose thin lips and cheeks were garishly colored with bright red lipstick and rouge.

  Despite the limited floor space in the room, Abby’s mother propelled her hand-powered chair through the maze of furnishings with practiced ease.

  “I’m Elizabeth Stevens, Abigail’s mother,” she announced. “I can’t imagine what possessed her to go rushing off without bothering to properly introduce us. Who are you? What are you doing here? Not selling something, I hope. Maybe you’re a pair of those Bible-thumping missionaries? They’re forever showing up on the front porch and ringing our doorbell. I’ve told Abby a hundred times not to let them inside. You’re not some of those, are you?”

  “No,” Deb said with a laugh. “Definitely not. I’m Detective Deb Howell, and this is Sheriff Brady.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I forgot we have a lady sheriff these days,” Elizabeth said. “Call me old-fashioned, but I can’t imagine that a woman could do as good a job of running the sheriff’s department as a man would, and you still haven’t mentioned what you’re doing here or what it is you’re after.”

  Joanna knew that Abby Holder was a few years younger than her own mother. That meant that Elizabeth was somewhere in her eighties or even nineties. Somewhere along the way, she had decided to turn off her self-editing applications. She would say whatever came into her head and let the chips fall where they may. Not wanting to divulge the purpose of their visit, Joanna made a gentle stab at changing the subject.

  “Have you lived here long?” she asked.

  “Longer than I ever wanted,” Elizabeth shot back. “I’m afraid Abby made this bed. Now we both have to lie in it.”

  Out of Elizabeth’s line of vision, Abby had come into the room and was collecting a set of cups and saucers from the buffet.

  “Mother!” she exclaimed. “Please! Give it a rest.”

  “Well, it’s true,” Elizabeth sniffed. “If you hadn’t gone against your father’s wishes and married that Freddy Holder, we wouldn’t have to live in this dump.”

  It was easy to see that this was a long-established pattern, with Elizabeth Stevens bullying her daughter and with Abby taking it. This time, maybe for the first time ever, Abby seemed prepared to fight back, countering fire with fire.

  “If Daddy hadn’t made such spectacularly bad investments,” she said, “you wouldn’t have had to sell the big house on the Vista and come slumming with me.”

  Elizabeth seemed both astonished and dismayed by her daughter’s response. All the natural color drained from her face, leaving only the bright red clownlike layer of rouge glowing on otherwise stark white cheeks.

  “I won’t have you speaking about your father in such a disrespectful manner,” she declared.

  Abby didn’t back off. “I won’t have you speaking disrespectfully about Fred, either,” she returned. “He and I found this place together, and he paid for it with his life. Just remember, if it weren’t for your being able to come here to live with me, you and all your furniture would have been out on the street. How about a little gratitude for a change?”

  “Well,” Elizabeth huffed. “I never!”

  With that, she spun her chair into a sudden about-face and sped from the room.

  “I’m sorry you had to witness that,” Abby said. “Most of the time I just let what she says wash over me. Today I couldn’t.”

  I don’t blame you a bit, Joanna thought. She said aloud, “Fred was your husband?”

  Abby nodded. “My father was the superintendent of the mines. Fred’s father was an underground miner. That’s all Fred ever wanted to be, too—a miner, just like his dad, Daniel. Fred knew he wasn’t cut out for college; his grades weren’t good enough, but he knew that working underground he’d be able to support us. Naturally my parents despised him. They thought I could do far better in the matrimony department than marrying some guy who worked underground. They did everything they could think of to break us up. I know my father told the guys at the company employment office that Fred wasn’t miner material, but I figured out a way around it.”

  “What was that?” Joanna asked.

  “I told Fred we should pretend that we had caved. I came home from a date one night in April, crying my heart out. I told my parents that I had broken up with him, and it worked like a charm. They were thrilled. Two things happened after that. Suddenly—magically—Fred was no longer persona non grata in the employment department. The strike was over by then. Fred got a job working underground, and I set about signing up for the fall semester in Flagstaff.

  “Back then, it was still called the Northern Arizona Teacher’s College. It wasn’t even a university. My mother was in her element, though, shopping like crazy to get me properly decked out to go off to school in the fall, but I fooled them. Two weeks after high school graduation, on the day I turned eighteen, Fred and I eloped. We got married in Lordsburg. Fred had already moved out of his parents’ place and rented this one. When we moved in here, my parents had a conniption fit. My father officially disowned me. He never spoke to me again, not even when Fred died a few months later.”

  “He died?” Joanna asked.

  Abby nodded.

  “What happened?”

  “He died in a mining accident less than two months after we got
married. The stope he was in collapsed. The other miners managed to dig him out, but it was too late. He was already dead. Fred’s parents were always as good as gold to me, right up until they both died. All of which made the way my parents acted that much worse. My parents didn’t even bother coming to the funeral.

  “With Fred gone, I was completely on my own. I had taken typing and shorthand in high school. Luckily I managed to get hired as the school secretary at Greenway Elementary School. My father wasn’t speaking to me at the time, and he wasn’t on the school board, either, but for all I know he might have helped engineer my being offered the job so I’d at least be self-supporting. A few months later, when Fred’s life insurance paid off, I went to my landlord and offered to buy this place. Paid cash for it. I’ve been here ever since.”

  “How long has your mother been living with you?” Joanna asked.

  “Six years now,” Abby said. “When my father retired from Phelps Dodge, my mother signed the paperwork saying it was all right for him to take a lump-sum distribution instead of a pension. The trouble was, he got all caught up in day trading and lost the money.”

  “He lost all of it?”

  Abby nodded. “He used creative money-managing techniques to keep my mother from finding out how bad things were, but once he died and was no longer able to juggle things around, his financial house of cards finally collapsed. That’s when my mother discovered she was destitute. The house on the Vista, the one mother had lived in all her married life, was mortgaged to the hilt. Since there was no pension, all she had coming in were the Social Security checks that came to her as my father’s widow. The bank was foreclosing on the house. They were going to throw her and all her worldly goods out into the street, so I took her in.”

  “Under the circumstances, you did more than most people would have,” Joanna said.

  Abby shrugged. “She’s my mother. What else could I do? I had planned on retiring in the next year or two. Now, with Mother living here and with my hours cut back to just four days a week, that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

  From the kitchen the shrill whistle of a boiling teakettle demanded attention. Stacking the cups, saucers, plates, and teapot onto a tray, Abby hurried into the kitchen to tend to it.

  “If I had been in her shoes, I think I would have told my mother to piss off,” Deb Howell muttered.

  Joanna nodded. “No one would have blamed you, either.”

  “I always thought people who lived on the Vista had perfect lives,” Deb added thoughtfully. “This sounds anything but perfect.”

  That had been Joanna’s perception, too. She’d had no idea of the steep price that someone like Abby, one of the seemingly privileged few, might have paid living as a virtual prisoner, first as a victim of her parents’ demanding expectations and later as the target of their unrelenting disapproval. It pained Joanna to think that all the time she and the other kids had secretly made fun of Abby Holder’s perpetually grim outlook on the world, the poor woman had been coming to work, day after day and year after year, with a permanently broken heart, mourning the loss of both the love of her life and the love of her parents. Generations of schoolkids had mistaken that sadness for anger.

  By the time Abby returned from the kitchen, Joanna Brady regarded her with a whole new respect.

  She came into the living room carrying a tray laden with tea makings, including a plate of carefully trimmed, triangular cucumber sandwiches. She set the tray down on the coffee table in front of Joanna and Deb.

  “If you’ll excuse me for a moment,” she said, “I’ll take something in to my mother.”

  She dosed a cup of tea with cream and sugar, took it and a plate holding three sandwiches with her, and went off in the same direction in which her mother had departed. She returned a few moments later. If she’d had to endure another tirade from her mother in the meantime, it didn’t show on her face or in her actions. She sat down and served tea in a fashion that not even her highly critical mother could have faulted.

  “I don’t believe I ever said a proper thank-you to your father, Sheriff Brady,” Abby said quietly as she passed Joanna a delicate bone china cup and saucer. The cup was filled to the brim with fragrant tea. It took real concentration on Joanna’s part to keep from slopping some of it into the saucer at this unexpected turn in the conversation.

  “Thanked him for what?” Joanna asked.

  “For digging Fred out of the stope the day he died,” Abby answered. “Your father was one of the crew of miners who pulled him out of the muck and tried to revive him. Of all those guys, your father was the only one who had balls enough to come to Fred’s funeral. Everyone else was so afraid of what my father might do that they didn’t dare show up.

  “As a consequence, it was a very small funeral,” Abby continued. “Your mother came, too, by the way, but it was your father whose job was on the line. Your parents were a little older than I was, but back then we were all relatively young. I was barely out of high school and already a widow. I didn’t really understand the risk your father ran by going against my father’s wishes, and I never made a point of telling your father how much it meant to me. I’m thanking you because I never thanked him.”

  It wasn’t the first time in Joanna Brady’s years in law enforcement that she had heard stories about her late father, D. H. Lathrop, being a stand-up kind of guy. She could count on one hand, however, the number of times her mother, Eleanor, had been mentioned in that regard. Now she wondered if being at odds with the superintendent of the local mining branch, the town’s major employer, might have had something to do with her father’s leaving the mines to go into law enforcement. Everyone had always maintained that D.H. had stopped working underground because he had wanted to.

  Was that really true? Joanna wondered now. Or was he forced out?

  “When did your husband die?” Joanna asked.

  “August 4, 1968,” Abby answered without the slightest hesitation, as though the date were indelibly engraved on her heart the same way the date of Andy’s death was engraved on Joanna’s.

  “We were newlyweds who didn’t have any money,” Abby continued. “All the miners in town were broke because of the strike, and nobody could afford to go on vacation, us included, but because it was so hot, we decided to go camping in the White Mountains during shutdown. The accident happened the day after Fred went back to work. The mine inspectors said that something must have shifted during the shutdown and that caused the stope to collapse.”

  In the old Phelps Dodge days, the word “shutdown,” in Bisbee, had meant that the mines simply ceased operation for two weeks during the summer, and everyone who worked for the company went on vacation at the same time. Joanna’s father was already working for the sheriff’s department by the time she was born. So even though her family wasn’t directly affected by the shutdown, Joanna remembered how long and lonely those two weeks seemed to be when it had felt as though she were the only child left on Planet Bisbee.

  Now Joanna made a mental note of the date Abby Holder had mentioned. It was obviously a pivotal one in Abby’s life, but Joanna wondered if perhaps it might be important in her own family’s history as well.

  “More tea?” Abby asked, reaching for Joanna’s empty cup.

  “Yes, please,” Joanna said. “Now, perhaps we could go back to your telling us what you know about Debra Highsmith.”

  CHAPTER 7

  DEB AND JOANNA SAT IN ABBY’S OVERSTUFFED LIVING ROOM FOR the better part of another hour, asking questions and taking notes. Abby allowed as how Debra Highsmith had seemed to be out of sorts for the past several weeks, although, as far as her secretary knew, there was nothing specific that had caused any kind of problem, at least nothing that had filtered down to the secretarial level. Abby knew of no fractious relations with any of the faculty members. Bisbee High School students, as a group, had performed well on their standardized tests, scoring several points better than they had a year earlier. Debra’s relationships with t
he school board and the district office were fine …

  Abigail Holder abruptly stopped speaking as a thoughtful but telltale frown flitted across her face.

  “What?” Joanna prodded.

  “Well, there was that one situation with the board.”

  “What situation was that?”

  “Ms. Highsmith suspended a student, and the board made her back off.”

  “Would the student in question happen to be Marty Pembroke?” Joanna asked.

  “Why, yes,” Abby said, blinking in surprise. “That’s the one. How did you know?”

  “Word gets around,” Joanna said, answering Abby’s question in a fashion that was only one small step short of a terse “no comment.”

  “Although,” she added, after a pause, “I don’t think I remember seeing anything about it in the Bisbee Bee.”

  “That’s right,” Abby said. “Most of the discussions were conducted behind closed doors because the student involved is still a juvenile. The only thing that was made public was that the terms of a suspension had been adjusted so that schoolwork and exams could be made up after the fact. When Ms. Highsmith came to work the next morning, she was absolutely livid. In all the years we worked together, I never saw her as upset as she was that day until a couple of days later.”

  “She was more upset later? Why? What happened then?”

  “Even though the paper didn’t publish anything on the subject, that didn’t stop the kid from going public. I haven’t seen it, but I’ve been told Marty wrote a blog entry about it and posted the whole story on his Facebook page, complete with an utterly despicable video of Ms. Highsmith.”

  “You saw it?”

  Abby nodded. “That really frosted Ms. Highsmith. The school board protected Marty’s privacy, but he had no compunction about bandying about his own version of things to anyone who would listen. According to him, she was the real villain of the piece. I wasn’t the only one who suggested she sue him for libel.”